


Unimaginable Thing

by bentleys



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 22:44:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bentleys/pseuds/bentleys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time the Doctor sees Amelia Pond it’s a Thursday afternoon and she’s not yet finished, her chest open in a whirring mess of gears. (In which Amy Pond is an automaton.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unimaginable Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for day 10's prompt, "Frost."

 

> I am not an unimaginable thing
> 
> My thoughts are tangible
> 
> though they're full of springs.
> 
>  
> 
> "Automatonic Electronic Harmonics" by Steam Powered Giraffe

__

The first time the Doctor sees Amelia Pond it’s a Thursday afternoon and she’s not yet finished, her chest open in a whirring mess of gears.

“Nice workmanship,” he tells the woman who made her, and then Amelia’s eyes flick open.

The Doctor jumps back. “She’s alive!”

The engineer smiles, half-metal teeth glinting. “Artificial intelligence,” she says.

“Ah,” says the Doctor, clasping his hands together.

\--

It’s Friday morning when he escapes with Amelia Pond. It’d taken him three hours to pinpoint exactly how far ahead the engineer’s technology was, and then about five minutes to guess which species she belonged to. (There were only so many 25th century human offshoots with a significant steampunk obsession. It rather narrowed it down.)  The remaining seven hours and fifty-five minutes had been spent attempting to shut down her operations, a process made much easier by the timely arrival of the woman’s twin sister.

“Probably shouldn’t have set up in _actual_ 18 th century Earth,” he’d pointed out as she’d hissed curses at him, her sister, and the world at large. “Bit of a giveaway.”

He goes back to look for any creations left behind, but it looks as if the only automation who’s been grafted with AI is the first one he saw, the one the engineer had called ‘Amelia Pond.’

When he goes back to the room she’s sitting up on the operation table. Her face-plate is hanging open, eyes glowing green in the wire-nested sockets.

“Amelia?” the Doctor calls, and she turns toward him. She looks almost as if she’s made of porcelain; though he knows she can’t be—he can see the silver underside, even—but she’s that smoothly pale. It must be paint.

“May I?” he asks uncertainly, raising his hands to shut the plate. She nods and he carefully slides the metal plate into the little slots on the edge of her head, not wanting to scratch the hard lines of her beauty.

“There’s screws,” she says abruptly, and he startles a little at her voice. It doesn’t _sound_ synthetic.

“What?”

“There’re screws,” she says again, “to hold the plate down. I saw her use them.”

The Doctor slides his hands over the compartments on the table until he finds a handful of white-capped screws.

“I’ve got this under control,” he tells Amelia seriously, and pulls out his sonic screwdriver.

She seems taken-aback by the noise, and then fascinated. Her metal lids slip shut for a moment and she seems to be listening.

“Amelia,” he says, as the last screw locks itself into place and his screwdriver shuts off, “do you want to come with me?”

“Why?”

He chews his lip. “Your… engineer, creator, whatever you want to call her—she’s being taken home. I can catch up with her, if you want, but. I was thinking, maybe you wanted to come with me instead?”

He stares into the orbs of her eyes. “I don’t know what she wanted you for, but I’ll never make you do anything you don’t want to.”

She studies him, the gears whirring within her as she tilts her head.  “What do you do?”

He smiles. “I’m a traveler. We can go anywhere in all of space and time.”

“That’s i-i-impossible,” she tells him, her voice glitching over the word.

“Now,” he says, his hearts swelling in his chest because he _knows_ he’s got her, “who on Earth told you _that?_ ”

 __

He first takes Amelia Pond to a small town north of Gloucester; opens the door and steps out. He waits for his hearts to stop thumping quite so quickly, and says, “Do you want to come outside?”

It’s winter, and there’s a chill in the air and frost covering the delicate strands of grass. Amelia steps onto the lawn, expressionless.

“Have you ever been outside before?” he asks her, gently.

“No,” she says. She takes a step and the grass crunches underneath her feet. She looks down.

“It’s frost,” the Doctor says. “The grass is so cold that ice crystals form instead of dew drops.” He realizes he’s about to start babbling and promptly shuts his mouth.

“I know,” Amelia says, but she drops to her knees and brushes pale, gleaming fingers over the ground. The white crystals come away on her fingertip, and she studies them with the intensity the Doctor knows is probably programed into her. Her skin is cold, he knows, but the difference is enough, and soon enough the frost melts to liquid, sliding over her hand.

Amelia turns her head to look back at him.  She smiles big, revealing the soft silver of the inside of her mouth.

“I think I’d like to come with you,” she says.

The Doctor gives up trying to regulate the pace of his hearts and lets them patter out of control. His spreads his arm toward the heavens, grinning.

“All of time and space, Amelia,” he says, “Everything that ever happened or ever will.

“Where do you want to start?”

**Author's Note:**

> The quote used at the top is from Steam Powered Giraffe's song [ Automatonic Electronic Harmonics ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQWY-JOhF2I), and you should totally check them out because they are a "musical pantomime troupe" that preforms as _steampunk robots._ Come on, how is that not awesome?
> 
> The quote at the end is, of course, from Eleven himself, in "The Eleventh Hour."


End file.
